People

A student defends her thesis in front of a committee.

Our Expertise

Our core faculty members have expertise in phonetics and phonology (the physical sounds of language); the processes of learning a first or second language; sociolinguistics (the effects of society and culture on the way languages are used); and teaching English as a second language.

We emphasize the importance of linguistics in understanding present and past societies; using descriptive methods to understand how language is used; and applying language theory to actual situations. But we also emphasize an atmosphere of cooperation, dedicated to bringing out the best in our students and our colleagues.

Find Out More

Read more about our faculty and we think you’ll agree that the combination of scholarship and real-world experience that they bring to the Department of Linguistics makes it the ideal place to begin or expand a career in the field.

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Meet Our People

Alan Juffs

Associate Professor Alan Juffs is the director of the English Language Institute. He specializes in linguistic theory, second language acquisition, syntax and semantics, TESOL, and working memory and sentence processing.

Claude Mauk

Claude Mauk directs the Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center. His main interests are phonetics, phonology, language acquisition and psycholinguistics as they relate to American Sign Language.

Matthew Kanwit

Matt Kanwit newly joined our department in 2014. His research in Hispanic Linguistics focuses on the intersection of second language (L2) acquisition and sociolinguistic variation.

MJ Shahen

Maryjean (Mj) Shahen is currently employed as an American Sign Language
instructor at the University of Pittsburgh and is an adjunct
instructor/member of the interpreting team as a mentor at the Community
College of Allegheny County.

Na-Rae Han

Na-Rae Han is the director of the Robert Henderson Language Media Center. Her main areas of interest are computational linguistics, intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL), and corpus linguistics.